


I never told you what I do for a living

by GunmetalBlade



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Crime Scene, Eudora POV, F/M, Non-graphic death, One Shot, Unstable relationship, mention of injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 18:13:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18997894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GunmetalBlade/pseuds/GunmetalBlade
Summary: Eudora Patch's first impression of Diego Hargreeves was that of a small dog who thought it was a big dog. Growly and self-centered, with big brown eyes and a lopsided smile and a penchant for picking fights with guys twice his size. Half a year younger than her, with one-fifth of the maturity. He was watchful and intuitive, but he was all too quiet about his past for someone with that loud of an attitude.





	I never told you what I do for a living

**Author's Note:**

> Title by the MCR song of the same name.
> 
> This was written in an hour and a half on a late-night whim. Inaccuracies are all on me and my poor lifestyle decisions.

 

 

Eudora Patch's first impression of Diego Hargreeves was that of a small dog who thought it was a big dog. Growly and self-centered, with big brown eyes and a lopsided smile and a penchant for picking fights with guys twice his size. Half a year younger than her, with one-fifth of the maturity. He was watchful and intuitive, but he was all too quiet about his past for someone with that loud of an attitude.

 

Diego Hargreeves had too many scars and had too good of an aim, and Eudora Patch was a smart woman, but it didn't take a genius to put two and two together (no pun intended). She found herself watching the ex-hero, wondering how he had ended up here - angry and guarded, flinching away from contact and bristling when someone raised their voice. He would hunch his shoulders after biting out an insult, eyes hooded but blazing like he expected to be beat...and that when he was, he would fight back with everything he had. 

 

Eudora Patch was a people watcher, always trying to find what someone's true nature was, and what sort of background they had come from, and whether they had decided to become a cop for the power, or to help people, or because it was their last chance at a career before there was no other option but the military.

 

So Eudora Patch wondered, as one was prone to do, why Diego Hargreeves, ex-superhero and adopted son of a millionaire, was working overnights at a seedy downtown gym to try and scrape up enough money for a schoolbook and a uniform and a dirt-cheap tuition. She was starting to think that, maybe, the Umbrella Academy wasn't all just cute kids in domino masks and schoolboy uniforms who beat up donut shop robbers. 

 

It would make sense, really. Why would a man who sends his children in to apprehend gunmen be a good father at home, away from the crowds and the cameras? 

 

At eighteen years old Number Two, the Kraken, Diego Hargreeves, was another nobody. Few people recognized the name and those who did refused to believe he was the same person that had been on the news a couple of years back. Eudora tried to remember when the Umbrella Academy stopped being a thing, and she realized it happened gradually, right under the paparazzi's nose. 

 

(Because in 2002 the Boy stopped appearing in the tabloids, and in 2005 there was a funeral ceremony for the Horror - and people seemed to realize, then, that these children, despite their powers, could actually die. Half a year later, one of the kids flew out to L.A., two of them slipped away into the night, and one was left to fight crime like his life depended on it. (Eudora didn't know it, but he would do so until 2015, when his father decided the Earth needed a watchman from somewhere far, far away.) As Spaceboy continued to fight alone, there were gradually a lot less prisoners taken in handcuffs than in body bags. It was 2003, and the single remaining student of the Umbrella Academy was third-page news.)

 

By the second semester, Eudora Patch realized that sometimes watching someone can go both ways. It was no coincidence how often she glanced over at Hargreeves to see his gaze flicker away and then back, emboldened and paired with a cocky smile. In all reality, it should have warned her away, but something about it made her stomach clench funny in a way she both hated and loved.

 

And really, the fact that she had to physically drag him away from a three to one fight should have told her to pretend he didn't exist at all, to give up, to let Hargreeves be Diego and Patch be Patch, but damn. The way he smiled through the pain when she slammed him up against her car and poured hydrogen peroxide down the side of his face did something stupid to her brain. By this point, she wasn't just watching him to find out why the hell he wanted to be a cop anymore. (It should have been obvious, really - all Diego knew how to do was fight the things he hated.)

 

He stuttered when asking her out on a date, and when he kissed her it was clumsy and awkward, but he kept his hands where they were supposed to be and he walked her home at ten-thirty and she'd never seen him _smile like that_ and hell, if it wasn't something out of a corny romance novel: academy bad boy ex the stickler for rules.

 

In short, Eudora Patch was totally and utterly doomed. 

 

(They broke up in 2004. _Numb_ by Linkin Park was crackling over the radio for the fifth time that day when Eudora apologized _but it wasn't going to work out, not after he'd been thrown out of the academy._ He'd used up his seventy-times-seven chances.)

 

She didn't see him again until 2007. 

 

\--

 

_I Don't Love You_ by My Chemical Romance, that New Jersey band the lonely kids like, faded in and out of the thrift store radio. It was a chilly early dusk and Eudora Patch was standing on the inside of the police tape, casting dark looks at passersby who tried (and failed) to inconspicuously edge closer. She couldn't blame them, honestly, but it was her job to make sure the knife-riddled bodies didn't get messed with until the detective got there.

 

And damn if he wasn't taking his sweet time. 

 

Something dark flashed in the corner of her vision. She spun on her toes, gun raised. The ramshackle apartment complex squatted silently, unaffected by the gruesome scene before it. It cast an inky shadow across the gravel alleyway that ran between it and the dilapidated homeless shelter. Eudora skirted the bodies, flinching when her boot sent a bullet shell skittering across the pavement. She froze. If the murderer was still out there....

 

Then they wouldn't wait for police backup to arrive to put a bullet in her head. Eudora crept forward, freezing every three steps. A short, hoarse cough - almost concealed, but not quite - sent shudders down her spine.

  
"Come out with your hands up," she barked, pistol aimed into the alleyway. There was a short curse and the crunch of gravel and before she knew it, Eudora - always too damn ready to do what was right - was taking chase, in the dark, after a criminal who'd killed three men with three small knives.

 

The person - she could see a silhouette now, short and broad-shouldered, in the half-light - stumbled, tripping over a loose brick and landing hard on his knees with a pained shout. "Freeze!" Eudora screamed, heart beating a heavy staccato in her chest as she fumbled for her flashlight.

 

The figure lifted his hands, hunching his shoulders and raising his chin even as she circled around him, clicking her light on and shining it square in his face.

 

Even with purple bruises painting the side of his face and blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth, that smirk was unmistakable. "Fancy meeting you here," Diego croaked.

 

"Shit," Eudora swore, and her gun was aimed at his forehead - probably still would've been even if he hadn't just killed someone, because the last time they'd spoken he'd told her to fuck herself into an early grave and slammed the door hard enough to crack the frame. "What the _hell_ do you think you're doing?"

 

Diego coughed, grin slipping from his face. "If you mean literally, probably bl-bleeding to death."

 

Eudora almost faltered, then, but she didn't. "Did you kill those three men?" she hissed.

 

"If you're tal-talking about that _lovely_ trio of rapists, then yeah," Diego answered smugly, eyes going unfocused just long enough to be noticeable. 

 

Eudora Patch cursed herself, then, because she should tase him then and there and then clap him in handcuffs and throw him in the dirty back seat of the cruiser (she hadn't had time to hose it out since that junky'd been in there that morning), whether or not he was actually bleeding to death. But instead she asked, "where are you hurt?" because she was a strong woman with a soft damned heart that would be the death of her someday.

 

Diego laughed and then it turned into wet coughing, and then it was choking, and then he was listing to the side but he steadied himself against the brick wall with no regards to the Glock pointed at his face. "W-w-want the whole list?"

 

Eudora ground her teeth. "I'm taking you to the station. I trust you not to do anything stupid between now and then." She holstered her gun and moved around behind him, grabbing one of his wrists and twisting it against his back, eliciting a pained whimper that definitely didn't make her heart hurt, not a bit. "If you move a muscle, I'll shoot you."

 

"I pro-promised I'd never hurt you, didn't I?" Diego slurred, twisting his head to look at her. 

 

Eudora's nose wrinkled because he had hurt her, he had, just not physically. But those were old bones long since buried. He was just another criminal now.

"Stand up," she ordered, yanking him upwards. To Diego's credit, he tried, but his legs gave out beneath him and then his eyes were rolling back in his head and Eudora barely managed to keep his face from smacking the ground. 

 

\--

 

Eudora Patch was a sensible woman. She told this to herself when she covered for Hargreeves' ass, and took him home to her little button apartment and cleaned his wounds and left him to sleep (still handcuffed, but in the front this time; she wasn't a sadist) on her raggedy couch.

 

"I'm taking you to the station tomorrow morning," she had promised, but he was half-lucid and grinned at everything she said.

 

She actually took him to the station at 3 A.M. after catching him trying to slip out a window. Then she spent the rest of the night filling out paperwork and trying to ignore the conversation that Diego was having with the schizophrenic junkie she'd dragged in yesterday.

 

"Are you here to get me out?" Diego asked, leaning against the bars. He was still pale, but the wounds had been mostly superficial and he'd more or less recovered from the minor concussion. The junkie was draped against him, chatting up a storm (with the thin air to his left, like usual), but Diego didn't seem particularly phased by it. In fact, he seemed more _disgruntled_ with the entire situation than anything.

 

In the end, he was released with self defense charges (and if Eudora had ended up pulling a couple of strings, then who cares). 

 

She saw him more frequently after that, more often than not at a crime scene he had no business being present near, but he was bold, and she was stupid, and sometimes it felt better to have another person in her lonely bed, even if she knew he had blood on his fingers and death in his eyes. (But for her, he was always gentle touches and warm looks and cruel words that he never really meant but he'd been raised to hurt people and he did it so well.)

 

They were heart-breakingly on and off again and half the time neither of them knew which it was, but when they sought each other out after a dark night of bloodstains and untraceable fingerprints and dancing on two different sides of justice then somehow nothing mattered.

 

But in 2019 when the same self-destructive Diego showed up at her doorstep, because his mom had died (and she was sorry about that, she really was) and he was hurting and he didn't know how to handle it, Eudora had to walk away because he'd been raised to hurt (and it was all he knew how to do).


End file.
